Terry Marotta: Let’s not rush into the holidays

Monday

Nov 23, 2009 at 12:01 AMNov 23, 2009 at 11:16 PM

It was Nov. 16 when I saw 300 Christmas trees being delivered to a nursery near my house! Isn’t any tree taken down this early a virtual tinderbox, its vascular system cut off so far in advance from the soil? I wouldn’t be so worked up about this if I hadn’t in the past gotten pretty caught up in the holiday hype myself.

Terry Marotta

This past week I bought both my two little grandsons a pop-gun, a slender wooden tube with a perpendicular handle that you pump to make a wee cork jump out of the barrel.

They pounced on them the second they saw the little toys, which, lucky for me, seemed harmless even to their gun-loathing parents.

I know I liked them as soon as I saw them at the Plimoth Plantation Gift Shop. They just fit so exactly with the sense of cheery commerce surrounding the site of the 1620 landing, where the closest place of business to Plymouth Rock is Pebbles Restaurant. (Get it? Rock? Pebbles?)

I wasn’t trying to conjure up memories of violence between English settlers and native peoples, though, really I wasn’t. I was just trying to mark Thanksgiving while Thanksgiving was still with us, thus keeping at bay that extended commercial break that is the holiday season.

Which this year seems to have started earlier than ever. I mean it was Nov. 16 when I saw 300 Christmas trees being delivered to a nursery near my house! Isn’t any tree taken down this early a virtual tinderbox, its vascular system cut off so far in advance from the soil?

I wouldn’t be so worked up about this if I hadn’t in the past gotten pretty caught up in the holiday hype myself.

There’s this prevailing myth that you can enjoy a calmer holiday season if you shop the catalogs instead of the actual stores, right?

Well, fool that I am, I believed it and actually bought our Christmas tree through a catalog. But the text seemed to imply so very much! That “my” tree would be so much fresher than any other people’s trees. That it had lived a free and meaningful life. That it had been humanely “harvested,” probably with a nice ceremony of prayer and song. And all JUST ONE DAY before shipment.

Anyway, I ordered the thing and announced as much to my family - who howled with so much derisive laughter that I spent every day before delivery saying “Just WAIT!,” YOU’ll see!” and so on.

Finally the great moment arrived: UPS drove up and tossed the thing - whomp! - in my yard.

It looked like a giant green Q-tip.

Maybe a tall green carrot.

And it continued to look this way even three days after I had released it from its plastic netting.

Also, it didn’t smell the least bit piney. It smelled like somebody’s couch.

But I put the best face on things as a mother will do, trimmed it up all on my own and was waiting by it in the living room when our youngest child got home from college.

“Wh-a-a-a-t?” he said on glimpsing this abomination. Then, “No, no, no, no. …” Then, on hearing my explanation AND WITHOUT EVEN TAKING OFF HIS COAT, he got out the step ladder, took off every bit of decoration, dragged the poor thing out back and within an hour had a whole new tree set up in its place.

“It’s OK, Mum,” he said stringing the lights on this great big Fatso of a fir. “We’ll just pretend this didn’t happen.”

Well maybe he can do that, but I can’t. I am changed and have made a solemn vow never again to lose my perspective and let one crazy day a full month in the future ruin week after week of potentially calm intervening days.

In my book it’s Thanksgiving until this weekend is over, gosh darn it! Now where did I put those pop-guns?

Write Terry at terrymarotta@verizon.net or P.O. Box 270, Winchester, MA 01890. Go to her blog Exit Only (www.terrymarotta.wordpress.com ) to read more or leave a comment.

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